BACKGROUND: Despite evidence suggesting higher quality and safer care in hospitals with comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) systems, factors related to advanced system usability remain largely unknown, particularly among nurses. Little empirical research has examined sociotechnical factors, such as the work environment, that may shape the relationship between advanced EHR adoption and quality of care. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to examine the independent and joint effects of comprehensive EHR adoption and the hospital work environment on nurse reports of EHR usability and nurse-reported quality of care and safety...

BACKGROUND: The association between birth weight and type 2 diabetes mellitus has been debated for several decades, and the dose-response relationship has not been reported. The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to quantitatively clarify the association between birth weight and risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus based on cohort studies. METHODS: We searched PubMed, Web of Science and Embase Databases for cohort study articles on the association between birth weight and risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus published up to March 1, 2018...

Excessive centrosomes often lead to multipolar spindles, and thus probably to multipolar mitosis and aneuploidy. In Caenorhabditis elegans, approximately 70% of the paternal emb-27APC6 mutant embryonic cells contained more than two centrosomes and formed multipolar spindles. However, only 30% of the cells with tripolar spindles formed two cytokinetic furrows. The rest formed one furrow, similar to normal cells. To investigate the mechanism via which cells avoid forming two cytokinetic furrows even with a tripolar spindle, we conducted live-cell imaging in emb-27APC6 mutant cells...

Transactive response DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) pathology is common in old age and is strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia above and beyond contributions from other neuropathologies. TDP-43 pathology in aging typically originates in the amygdala, a brain region also affected by other age-related neuropathologies such as Alzheimer's pathology. The purpose of this study was two-fold: to determine the independent effects of TDP-43 pathology on the volume, as well as shape, of the amygdala in a community cohort of older adults, and to determine the contribution of amygdala volume to the variance of the rate of cognitive decline after accounting for the contributions of neuropathologies and demographics...

Locomotor activity is a major attribute of animals. Although this trait determines important ecological processes, such as dispersal and species interactions, the sources of its variation are not fully understood. We examined the influence of body temperature (13, 18, 23, and 28 °C) and individual identity on spontaneous locomotor activity in juvenile alpine newts, Ichthyosaura alpestris, over three consecutive weeks. Locomotor activity was characterized by four parameters: distance covered, mean velocity, frequency of movements, and total activity rate (all directional and non-directional movements)...

OBJECTIVES: Shwachman-Diamond syndrome (SDS) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder. Its predominant manifestations include exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, bone marrow failure and skeletal abnormalities. Patients frequently present failure to thrive and susceptibility to short stature. Average birth weight is at the 25th percentile; by the first birthday, >50% of patients drop below the third percentile for height and weight.The study aims at estimating the growth charts for patients affected by SDS in order to give a reference tool helpful for medical care and growth surveillance through the first 8 years of patient's life...

Cardiolipin (CL) is an anionic phospholipid that plays an important role in regulating protein biochemistry in bacteria and mitochondria. Deleting the CL synthase gene (Δ cls ) in Rhodobacter sphaeroides depletes CL and decreases cell length by 20%. Using a chemical biology approach, we found that a CL deficiency does not impair the function of the cell wall elongasome in R. sphaeroides ; instead, biosynthesis of the peptidoglycan (PG) precursor lipid II is decreased. Treating R. sphaeroides cells with fosfomycin and d-cycloserine inhibits lipid II biosynthesis and creates phenotypes in cell shape, PG composition, and spatial PG assembly that are strikingly similar to those seen with R...

Traditional models developed within cognitive psychology suggest that attention is deployed flexibly and irrespective of differences in expertise with to-be-attended stimuli. However, everyday environments are inherently multisensory and observers differ in familiarity with particular unisensory representations (e.g., number words, in contrast with digits). To test whether the predictions of the traditional models extend to such naturalistic settings, six-year-olds, 11-year-olds and young adults (N = 83) searched for predefined numerals amongst a small or large number of distractor digits, while distractor number words, digits or their combination were presented peripherally...

HYPOTHESIS: The electrostatic initiation of a jet from the meniscus of a polymeric solution is a key step in near-field electrospinning (NFES), however this process is not sufficiently understood to determine a criterion for the critical emitter voltage triggering the jet, nor to optimize the electrodes. It is expected that the jet initiation in NFES is similar to that in cone-jet electrosprays, and can be described with a first principles model. EXPERIMENTS: The electrostatic jet initiation of an SU-8 polymeric solution is studied with two different electrode geometries to quantify the initiation parameters and illustrate the optimization of the electric field...

The aim of the present work was to develop a computational model of how children acquire inflectional morphology for marking person and number; one of the central challenges in language development. First, in order to establish which putative learning phenomena are sufficiently robust to constitute a target for modelling, we ran large-scale elicited production studies with native learners of Finnish (N = 77; 35-63 months) and Polish (N = 81; 35-59 months), using a novel method that, unlike previous studies, allows for elicitation of all six person/number forms in the paradigm (first, second and third person; singular and plural)...

Currently, the elliptical vibration cutting/coining (EVC²) has been widely employed in fabricating various functional microstructure surfaces applied in many significant engineering fields. Therefore, for this study, a novel type of two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) piezoelectrically actuated pseudo-decoupled compliant mechanisms (PDCMs) with non-orthogonal decoupling structures, which can exactly generate the strict ellipse trajectories, was developed for improving the forming accuracies of the EVC² microstructures...

Progress in the field of biocompatible SERS nanoparticles has promising prospects for biomedical applications. In this work, we have developed a biocompatible Raman probe by combining anisotropic silver nanoparticles with the dye rhodamine 6G followed by subsequent coating with bovine serum albumin. This nanosystem presents strong SERS capabilities in the near infrared (NIR) with a very high (2.7 × 10⁷) analytical enhancement factor. Theoretical calculations reveal the effects of the electromagnetic and chemical mechanisms in the observed SERS effect for this nanosystem...

Traditional Collaborative Representation-based Classification algorithms for face recognition (CRC) usually suffer from data uncertainty, especially if it includes various poses and illuminations. To address this issue, in this paper, we design a new CRC method using histogram statistical measurement (H-CRC) combined with a 3D morphable model (3DMM) for pose-invariant face classification. First, we fit a 3DMM to raw images in the dictionary to reconstruct the 3D shapes and textures. The fitting results are used to render numerous virtual samples of 2D images that are frontalized from arbitrary poses...

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been widely used in all kinds of bridges. It is significant to accurately assess the serviceability and reliability of bridge subjected to severe conditions by SHM technique. Bridge deflection as an essential evaluation index can reflect structural condition perfectly. In this study, an approach for deflection calculation and reliability assessment of simply supported bridge is presented. Firstly, a bridge deflection calculation method is proposed based on modal flexibility and Kriging method improved by artificial bee colony algorithm...

The past decade may be considered as revolutionary in the research field focused on the physiological function of macrophages. Unknown subtypes of these cells involved in pathological mechanisms were described recently, and they are considered as potential drug delivery targets. The innate ability to internalize foreign bodies exhibited by macrophages can be employed as a therapeutic strategy. The efficiency of this uptake depends on the size, shape and surface physiochemical properties of the phagocyted objects...

The objective of this investigation was to analyze the mechanical features of two different prosthetic retention devices. By applying engineering tools like the finite element method (FEM) and Von Mises analyses, we investigated how dental implant devices hold out against masticatory strength during chewing cycles. Two common dental implant overdenture retention systems were analyzed and then compared with a universal-common dental abutment. The Equator® attachment system and the Locator® arrangement were processed using the FEM Ansys® Workbench...

Magnetic fluid hyperthermia (MFH) is a medical treatment where the temperature in the tissue is increased locally by means of heated magnetic fluid in an alternating magnetic field. In recent years, it has been the subject of a lot of research in the field of Materials, as well as in the field of clinical testing on mice and rats. Magnetic fluid manufacturers aim to achieve three objectives; high heating capacity, biocompatibility and self-regulatory temperature effect. High heating power presents the conversion of magnetic field energy into temperature increase where it is challenging to achieve the desired therapeutic effects in terms of elevated temperature with the smallest possible amount of used material...

The fat-soluble antioxidant 3,3'-diindolylmethane (DIM), is a natural phytochemical found in Brassica vegetables, such as cabbage, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. The stability of this compound is a major challenge for its applications. Polymerized whey protein (PWP)-based DIM nanoparticles were prepared at different mass ratios of protein and DIM by mixing PWP and DIM followed by ultrasound treatment for 4 min. All the nanoparticles were studied for particle size, zeta potential, rheological and microstructural properties, and storage stability...

We examine a model of two interacting populations of phase oscillators labeled "blue" and "red." To this we apply tempered stable Lévy noise, a generalization of Gaussian noise where the heaviness of the tails parametrized by a power law exponent α can be controlled by a tempering parameter λ. This system models competitive dynamics, where each population seeks both internal phase synchronization and a phase advantage with respect to the other population, subject to exogenous stochastic shocks...

We study theoretically the size distributions of nanoparticles (surface islands, droplets, molecular chains, and semiconductor nanowires) which grow without decay and with arbitrary size and time-dependent growth rates. Using a special transformation of variables, the analytic Green's function is obtained in the form of a Gaussian the variance of which is determined by the size dependence of the growth rate k(s). In the case of the power-law growth rates k(s)=(a+s)^{α}, the explicit formulas for the expectation and variance are given that contain earlier results in the limiting regimes...